What Yonge St. was to 20th-century Toronto,
Eglinton Ave.
could be to the 21st-century city. This enormously diverse thoroughfare extends all the way from Scarborough to Etobicoke and beyond. It is the only street that runs through all six pre-amalgamation boroughs.

For much of its length, Eglinton is lined with modest two-storey buildings — retail at grade, residential above — constructed since the 1950s and ’60s. Occupied by small businesses — everything from ethnic grocery stores and restaurants to bars and clothing shops — these gritty structures are unremarkable but brimming with vitality.

This is what Toronto looked like before corporate branding turned it into the universal landscape of franchises and global chains. West of Yonge especially, Eglinton is the city of 40 or 50 years ago, not pretty, but accessible, cheap and livable.

Well, maybe not as much as we'd like. Eglinton has also become a traffic nightmare awash with cars and the buses that serve its 54 routes.

But now, after decades of failure, frustration and fretting, the street will get
the transit it needs
. Though not a subway, when the $6.7-billion Crosstown light rail vehicle line opens in 2020, it will change the street from end to end and for better or worse, drag it into the modern age.

Some will resist; concerns about the future of mom and pop storefront operations have already been raised. Others fear the line, expected to provide 53 million rides annually, will bring development to Eglinton, which means more dreaded condos.

Both fears are legitimate; but the street has a long way to go before either becomes an issue. Besides, the truth is that from the start Eglinton has been a victim of poor planning, bad architecture, civic indifference and the car. The result is a self-defeating mix of suburban form and urban context, strip malls and towers, local thoroughfare and open highway.

The further Eglinton goes, east or west, the worse it gets. That means a slow but steady descent into disconnection and dislocation. The high-rise enclaves of Scarborough — growth centres of poverty and immigration — await the renewal that will enable them finally to flourish.

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New transit will set the stage on which this drama can unfold. It will bring the gift of mobility to whole swaths of the city where that remains the prerogative of car-owners, and even then only in very limited ways.

Of course the Crosstown will generate development; that’s one of its main benefits. The trick will be to control that growth and avoid mistakes of the past such as the appallingly dangerous intersection of Eglinton and Allen Rd.

The Crosstown will force us to take Eglinton seriously, to make sense of a street that has long been a dumping ground of discredited land-use and city-building theories. Post-war efforts to make the city neat and tidy, a separate place for every purpose, led instead to topography of physical isolation and social alienation.

At the same time, however, Toronto has within it the seeds of its own regeneration. Eglinton is a perfect example. The low-rise boxes that line the street are essentially the same as those still found on King, Queen, College, Dundas and even Yonge. Though humble, often shabby, they possess the great virtue of flexibility. Some think they will block revitalization, but they are precisely where it will play out.

The last time transit was tried on Eglinton — a subway started in 1994 — we actually dug a hole before we got scared and filled it in. Let’s hope Eglinton won't be taken for a ride twice.

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